A History of African American Autobiography

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

1. Introduction Joycelyn K. Moody; Part I. Origins and Histories: 2. Black life writing and print culture before 1800 Rhondda Robinson Thomas; 3. Reading the edited 'I' Eric D. Lamore; 4. An overview of nineteenth-century slavery narratives William L. Andrews; 5. 19th-century autobiographical writings by freeborn African Americans John Ernest; 6. African American life writing, 1865-1900 Andreá N. Williams; 7. Black life writing in print cultures at the turn into the twentieth century Lois Brown; 8. New negro autobiographies Cherene Sherrard Johnson; 9. Transnational and postcolonial Afro-Caribbean life writings Nicole Aljoe; 10. Writing race and remembrance in the Civil Rights Movement years Brian J. Norman; 11. The biomedicalization of black life narratives Moya Bailey and Whitney Peoples; Part II. Individuals and Communities: 12. Spiritual autobiography, past and present Cedrick May; 13. Life writings of contemporary African American women Barbara McCaskill; 14. The Autobiography of Malcolm X James Smethurst; 15. Black queer life writing Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman; 16. Black celebrity auto/biographies Anthony Foy; 17. Mixed race autobiographical narratives Caroline Streeter; 18. Black biography and the complexities of telling another's life Tara D. Green; 19. Black lives in persona poems Howard Rambsy II; 20. Depicting African American life in graphics and visual cultures Michael Chaney; 21. Life writing for Black children and youth Giselle Anatol; 22. Telling African American lives in literature for young readers Jonda McNair; 23. Can cups be books? Frances Smith Foster.

Joycelyn K. Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair of American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her scholarship includes Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (2001), and numerous essays on African American literature and feminism. She is Series Editor of African American Literature in Transition (Cambridge) and Co-Editor of the book series Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.